Jaws of Darkness (2 page)

One

E
alstan added up a long column of figures. The young bookkeeper let out a sigh of relief when the answer turned out to be what he’d expected. Bearing the ledger into his employer’s private office, he told Pybba, “Those Algarvians are going to make us rich.”

“Good,” the pottery magnate rumbled. “We’ll give ‘em some of their silver back, too, and not the way they expect.” Pybba wasn’t only the biggest pottery maker in Eoforwic—and, for that matter, in all of Forthweg. He was also one of the leaders in the underground struggle against the Algarvian invaders who occupied his kingdom.

“What
do
you suppose they want with fifty thousand Style Seventeen sugar bowls?” Ealstan asked. The question had bothered him ever since an Algarvian colonel marched in to place the order.

Pybba’s broad shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “Powers below eat the redheads, whatever it is.” His eyes flicked down to the bottom of the column. He nodded. “That’s not a bad pile of change, eh? Why don’t you go on home now? Your wife’ll be waiting for you, I expect.”

“Aye, she will. Thanks.” Ealstan was glad to have leave to head for his flat.

Pybba showed no sign of going anywhere. His bushy beard was shot with gray, but he went home later and came to work earlier than anybody he employed. “Go on,” he growled now. “Get out of here, before I change my mind.”

Odds were, he wasn’t joking. Ealstan set the ledger on his own slanted worktable, then got out while the getting was good. Twilight spread gloom across Eoforwic, though the occupied capital of the Kingdom of Forthweg seemed sad and gray and gloomy enough even at midday.

A couple of tall, lean Algarvian constables swaggered past Ealstan. Their arrogant stride made them stand out as much as their coppery hair and their short tunics and pleated kilts. Forthwegian men wore knee-length tunics like Ealstan’s; Forthwegian women wore loose tunics that reached their ankles. Men and women alike were stocky and swarthy, with dark hair and eyes and strong noses.

Some of the people on the street were almost certainly of Kaunian blood, too. But most of the Kaunians left alive in Eoforwic these days were sorcer-ously disguised to look like their Forthwegian neighbors. The Algarvians hated Kaunians as ancient enemies, and sacrificed them in droves to use their life energy to fuel potent sorceries in their war against Unkerlant to the west. Few Forthwegians cared what happened to their blond neighbors.

Ealstan was one of those few. Vanai, his wife, was a Kaunian. She was also the one who’d devised the sorcery that let her folk masquerade as Forthwegians. These days, she went by Thelberge, a Forthwegian name. Her own would have been plenty to betray her.

Not so long after winter yielded to spring, she would have their first child. Ealstan frowned a little as he walked along, wondering if the baby would need a spell cast over it every few hours for years to come. He hoped not. Some half-breed children looked altogether Forthwegian.

After a few paces, his frown deepened. Since she’d got pregnant, Vanai’s protective spell hadn’t been holding as long as it did before she found herself with child. If it happened to wear off while she was away from the flat…

His fingers writhed in an apotropaic sign. “Powers above, prevent it,” he said softly. They had so far. He had to hope they would keep on doing it. Vanai was careful. She knew the risk, too, of course. But she couldn’t see the illusion that fooled everyone else. The greatest danger lay there. She couldn’t see it stop fooling people, either.

Such worries dogged Ealstan about every other night on the way home. They made him walk faster, a lump of dread in his throat, as if an Algarvian constable were about to lay hold of
him
for being a Kaunian. His laugh held no mirth. He wasn’t a Kaunian. To the Algarvians, he was that even more suspicious creature, a Kaunian-lover. But being a Kaunian-lover didn’t show.

Here was his own street. Here was his own block. Here was his block of flats, a dingy building in a bad part of town. He and Vanai had stayed here ever since coming to Eoforwic from Gromheort and her village of Oyngestun in the east.

He went up the stairs into the cramped, dark lobby. He paused there, at the brass bank of post boxes, to see if anyone had sent him a letter. His family back in Gromheort knew where he lived. He didn’t think Vanai had any living family, not any more.

She has me,
he thought, and hurried up the stairs to his flat. The narrow stairway had a familiar reek: stale cabbage and stale piss. Sometimes it disgusted him. But he’d lived here long enough that sometimes, as tonight, it just felt homey.

Back when he and Vanai first moved in, before she’d crafted the spell that let her look like a Forthwegian, she’d stayed holed up in the flat all the time, like a trapped animal. They’d worked out a coded knock, to let her know it was safe to unbar the door and let him in. He still used it, more from habit than from any other reason.

He knocked and waited. When Vanai didn’t come to the door, he knocked again, louder this time. She fell asleep a lot more easily than she had before she got pregnant.

When she still didn’t come, he knocked once more, louder still. He frowned and took from his belt pouch the long brass key that could work the latch from the outside. If the door was barred, of course, working the latch wouldn’t matter one way or the other. He turned the key and pushed at the door, not expecting to be able to get in. But it swung open.

“Van—?” he began, but checked himself. He tried again, calling, “Thelberge? Are you there, sweetheart?”

No answer. The flat was quiet and dark, no lamps lit, as if nobody’d been inside since well before the sun went down. Fighting back alarm, Ealstan hurried into the bedchamber. Vanai wasn’t lying there sound asleep. She wasn’t sitting on the pot, which she also needed to do more than she had before quickening.

He’d already seen she wasn’t in the front room or the kitchen. He went back there anyway. “Thelberge?” Fear made his voice quaver.

Only silence answered. Little by little, Ealstan realized he hadn’t known what fear meant. Now he did.

My neighbors,
he thought wildly.
Maybe my neighbors know something.
Trouble was, he hardly knew his neighbors. For one thing, they kept coming and going—this block of flats wasn’t the sort of place where people settled down to live out the rest of their lives. And, for another, because of who and what Vanai was, she and Ealstan hadn’t gone out of their way to make friends. If anything, they’d gone out of their way to keep to themselves.

But he had to try. Thinking about the alternative … Ealstan didn’t want to, he wouldn’t, think about the alternative. Imagining Vanai in Algarvian hands … He shook his head. He
wouldn ‘t
think about that.

He knocked on the door to the next-door flat closer to the stairs. Silence. He knocked again. “Go away,” someone inside said—a woman’s voice.

“I’m your neighbor,” Ealstan began, “and I’d like to ask you—”

“Go away,” she said again, “or else I start screaming.”

“Powers below eat you,” he muttered under his breath, but he went away, to the flat on the other side of his. Wondering what would go wrong now, he knocked on the door there.

This time, at least, it opened. A gray-bearded man stood in the doorway. His narrow eyes had all the warmth of chips of ice. “What do you want, kid?” he demanded. “Whatever it is, make it snappy.”

“I don’t mean to bother you,” Ealstan said, “but have you seen my wife today? She was supposed to be home when I got back, and she’s not. She’s expecting a baby, so I’m worried.”

“Haven’t seen her.” His neighbor shook his head. “Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry. He sounded as if he never wanted to see Ealstan again. And when he slammed the door, Ealstan had to jump back in a hurry to keep from getting his nose flattened.

He stood in the hallway cursing softly, wondering whether even to bother knocking on the door across the hall from his. At last, with a sort of despairing shrug, he did. “Who is it?” came from inside: another woman’s voice.

“Ealstan, your neighbor from across the hall,” he answered, wondering if she’d open the door.

To his surprise, she did. She was somewhere in her late thirties—which, to Ealstan’s nineteen, made her seem almost grandmotherly, though little by little he realized she wasn’t really
bad
looking. She eyed him with frank appraisal. “Well, hello, Ealstan from across the hall,” she said when she was through, and breathed brandy fumes into his face. “I’m Ebbe. What can I do for you, dear? Want to borrow a cup of olive oil? You should have knocked a long time ago.”

Did that mean what it sounded like? Ealstan had more urgent things to worry about. “I don’t mean to bother you—” he began, as he had to his other neighbor.

“Oh, you’re not bothering me at all,” Ebbe broke in. Aye, she’d been drinking brandy, all right.

Rather desperately, Ealstan plunged ahead: “Have you seen my wife today? She should have been waiting for me when I got home, but she isn’t. I’m worried—she’s expecting a baby.”

“No, darling, I haven’t seen a soul today—till
you”
Ebbe answered. “But why don’t you come on in anyway? If she’s not there, maybe I’ll do.”

Ealstan fled. Back inside his own flat, he barred the door as if all the Algarvians in Forthweg were after him. He wondered if Ebbe would come knocking in turn. To his vast relief, she didn’t.

But that relief quickly passed. The Algarvians in Forthweg weren’t after him. They were after Vanai—and he was horribly afraid they had her.

He ate barley bread and olive oil and salted, garlic-tangy almonds for supper, washing the food down with harsh red wine. Then, instead of talking and laughing and probably making love with Vanai, he spent the longest, loneliest, most miserable night he’d ever passed. He might have slept a little. On the other hand, he might not have, too.

When dawn came, he made a breakfast much like his supper. Then, yawning, he started back to Pybba’s pottery. Someone—more likely several someones—had scrawled a new graffito—Habakkuk!—on walls and fences. Dully, he wondered what the nonsense word meant. Nothing in Forthwegian, Algarvian, or classical Kaunian; he was sure of that.

Pybba glared when he got to work. “You’re late,” he rasped, as he did most mornings whether Ealstan was or not. Then he took a longer look at his bookkeeper. “Powers above! Who hit you over the head with a rock?”

“I wish somebody had,” Ealstan answered. He wasn’t late. Anything but—he and Pybba had the offices to themselves. “My wife wasn’t home when I got there. She still isn’t. I think the redheads have grabbed her.”

“Why in blazes would they want her?” the pottery magnate demanded. “You two didn’t just have a fight or something?”

“No,” Ealstan said flatly. “Why would they want her? She’s Kaunian, that’s why.” He’d never told his boss that. Pybba hated Algarvians, aye, but he had no great use for blonds.

Now Pybba stared at him, eyes big as the saucers he turned out by the tens of thousands. “Oh, you fool!” he cried. “You great stupid fool!”

Habakkuk
—the first Habakkuk, the nameship of what would be a growing class—glided east along a ley line not far from the island kingdom of Sibiu. The hobnails in the soles of Leino’s boots dug into the great vessel’s icy deck. The Kuusaman mage smiled—no, he grinned. He was as proud of
Habakkuk
as if he’d invented her. Along with a good many other Kuusaman and Lagoan mages, he had.

Ships had sailed the seas for centuries uncounted: ships, aye, but none like
Habakkuk.
Ships had been wood and canvas, riding wind and wave.

Then, as magecraft and manufacturing grew more sophisticated, they’d been iron and steel, traveling the ley lines of the world’s energy grid in defiance of wind and wave. Now … Leino took another step. His hobnailed boots bit into the icy deck again.

Habakkuk
was a thing of ice, ice and a little sawdust for strength. Leino and his fellow mages had planed the top of an iceberg flat, down in the iceberg-ridden seas bordering the frigid austral continent. They’d hollowed out chambers in the ice, chambers that held men and supplies and—the point of the exercise—far more dragons than any ordinary ship could haul.

Magecraft had shaped the
Habakkuk.
More magecraft propelled it along the ley lines. And still more magecraft kept it from melting away to nothing as it sailed these warmer (though still far from warm) waters farther from the land of the Ice People. Leino wondered what the natives of the tropical continent of Siaulia would think if the
Habakkuk
ever had occasion to sail there. Most of them had never seen any ice in all their lives, let alone a great floating mountain of it that refused to disappear even in that blood-warm sea.

High overhead, a dragon screeched. Leino glanced up not in fear but in wariness, lest it prove an Algarvian beast diving to the attack. But it wasn’t; it was painted in the Kuusaman colors of sky-blue and sea-green, which made it hard to spot for a moment against the drifting clouds. Down it spiraled: long, snaky body; short, clawed limbs; great batwings now gliding, now beating; long neck and fearsome, big-eyed head. So much ferocity, all governed by a brain the size of a plum—and by the dragonflier who sat strapped into his harness at the base of the beast’s neck.